SQL Server Surface Area Configuration Tools

[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

Surface area reduction is a security measure that involves stopping or disabling unused components. Surface area reduction helps to improve security by providing fewer avenues for potential attacks on a system.

For new installations of Microsoft SQL Server, some features, services, and connections are disabled or stopped to reduce the SQL Server surface area. For upgraded installations, all features, services, and connections remain in their pre-upgrade state.

Use SQL Server Surface Area Configuration to enable, disable, start, or stop the features, services, and remote connectivity of your SQL Server installations. You can use SQL Server Surface Area Configuration on local and remote servers.

SQL Server Surface Area Configuration uses Window Management Instrumentation (WMI) to view and change server settings. WMI provides a unified way for interfacing with the API calls that manage registry operations that configure SQL Server. For information about configuring permissions related to WMI, see the topic How to: Configure WMI to Show Server Status in SQL Server Tools.

After you install or upgrade to SQL Server, you should run SQL Server Surface Area Configuration to verify which features and services are enabled and running, and to verify which types of connections SQL Server will accept. After initial configuration, you can use SQL Server Surface Area Configuration to verify or change the state of features, services, and connections.

Use Surface Area Configuration for Features to enable and disable features of the Database Engine, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services.
For descriptions of the features and information about default feature settings, see Surface Area Configuration for Features.

To import and export surface area settings, use the sac command-prompt utility. Using this utility, you can configure the surface area on one computer, and then apply the same settings to other computers.

The easiest way to use the sac utility is to use SQL Server Surface Area Configuration to configure one computer, and then use the sac utility to export the settings of that computer to a file. You can use that file to apply the same settings to SQL Server components on other computers.